Palo Alto Networks
Director, Brand and Creative | 2014–2015
By the numbers
Executive seminar series: 59% attendance among registered participants
26% conversion rate among attendees
Brand built from scratch — research through activation in under one year
Recognition
Brand strategy and platform approved by founders and senior executive team following primary research presentation
New brand expression adopted across all customer, developer, press, employee, and analyst touchpoints globally
“We were only known as ‘the fire-wall guys,’ but we had a cutting edge new security platform to sell.”
Palo Alto Networks was growing at an extraordinary rate — 58.6% year-over-year revenue growth, cybersecurity for 75 of the Fortune 100. But despite building the market's first fully integrated enterprise security platform, the company was still known for a single product. As one executive put it: "Our challenge is when you talk to existing customers, almost always people say, “PAN — you're the firewall guys.”
The opportunity was clear: reposition a hyper-growth company from a single-product vendor into the category-defining enterprise security leader.
“Most of our competitors emphasized customers’ vulnerability. We emphasized productivity and innovation as the key benefits from our security offering.”
The work
Started with primary research — 21 stakeholder interviews across founders, senior executives, analysts, and customers. The findings were clear: PAN was technically superior but categorically misunderstood. Competitors were all speaking the same language — "next gen," "industry-leading," "integrated" — and none of it was breaking through.
From that foundation built a complete brand strategy platform: new positioning, brand promise, personality attributes, messaging architecture, visual identity, voice and tone, logo refinement, graphic system, and creative templates. Activated across digital, print, OOH — including a memorable placement at the bottom of airport security bins, reaching C-suite security decision-makers exactly where cybersecurity is top of mind.
Built the in-house creative team from scratch and launched integrated campaigns across digital, print, event, and OOH.
Regional Marketing Security Seminar Series
Targeted Director-level security decision-makers with a campaign built around a single insight: these are people who take pride in solving complex challenges every day. The creative concept used a puzzle challenge to appeal to their curiosity and intellect — positioning PAN's integrated platform as the solution to the problem every competitor was failing to solve.
Single-minded value proposition: Palo Alto Networks is the only vendor to offer a true enterprise security platform to protect organizations against all cyber attacks.